“Nope!” shouted Pierce Stone. “Just the freaks!”
“But… my dad’s looks like this, and my younger brother…”
“You know what their penises look like?!”
“We shower together sometimes. Or we used to.”
I felt bad for Silas and wanted to defend him, because I showered with my brother too. And sometimes, especially when we were younger, my dad would shower with us, and we would look in the mirror and flex our muscles as we sang: “Macho, macho man!” I didn’t think it was weird at all. But Pierce Stone wasn’t clobbering me with his words this one time, and it felt good not to be the focus of his verbal blitz.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Ferraro had a turtle-neck in his pants too. All these foreigners and their freak dicks.”
“But I am American. I wish I was born in Aruba or Bermuda, or MartInik, but I was born at Saint Barnabas. It’s in Livingston, where my cousin lives and lots of Jews live. Maybe you know them, Matt… Jeremy?”
“My uncle lives in Livingston,” said Matt Dershowitz.
“My bubbe lives in Livingston,” said Jeremy Finklestein.
And my mom said they don’t all know each other.
“Yeah, so what?” said Pierce Stone. “Your family is still freaks, even if they are from here.”
“Freaks? Like goblins or ghouls or orcs? No, unfortunately we are the human race. Orcs are much better at wielding a battle-ax.”
“No. What? No, not that. Like your retarded sister.”
There was a heat in my face, like when I peered into the braciole simmering in marinara on the stove.
“Man, my sister can be a pain in the ass, but at least she’s normal.” They all laughed—but not as much as Pierce Stone—and it was all in slow motion, like molasses in January, like my father says, as Pierce Stone slapped the side of his hand against his chest and went, “Dehh, dehh, dehh dehh.”
Britney didn’t sound like that at all. A few of her classmates did. They would be making noises while I was reading to them about dinosaurs—okay, some were picture books, but I could make up the dinosaur stories, and isn’t that just as good as reading? And I didn’t mind; I knew they couldn’t help it. I knew they would never be able to tell their stories to anyone.
I didn’t hit Pierce Stone in the face even though I really wanted to hurt him, because my father says you also have to be defending yourself. That was the problem with getting clobbered with words instead of fists. The Short Hills kids were so good at wielding their weapons, and I didn’t have any armor and neither did Britney.
Life seemed to start over for me on the first mild day of spring, but I guess that’s the point, right? Ms. O’Donnell explained to us that spring started in March: “In like a lion, out like a lamb,” she said.
“March is like the cold pricklies turning into the warm and fuzzies,” she explained as we looked at the calendar with the month’s bubble letters in green—on every school calendar, even in my old town, March was always in green. I hated March. In New Jersey, it didn’t get warm until April, and on that first warm day, Karl and I would run around our conjoined backyards pretending we were the Knights of the Round Table fighting dragons and Saxons. We had been watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail every day after school (sometimes with the Offspring’s Americana album playing in the background) and could practically recite the entire movie line by line.
“Did you know he’s gay?” Karl said from his knees, acting as the armless and legless Black Knight.
“King Arthur?”
“No, Graham Chapman, the actor who plays King Arthur.”
“What’s gay, anyway?”
“It’s when boys like boys instead of girls.”
“But, I like boys instead of girls, at least most of the time.”
“No, not like that. Like the way you feel about Andrius’s mom.”
“Oh… How did you know that, Karl?”
“You stare at her whenever we see her walking Andrius to school. You can’t even say hello. Your face gets all red and…”
“Okay. I got it. But some boys feel that way about other boys?”
“Yes.”
“Are they supposed to?”
“I don’t know.”
Karl got up from his knees and banged his invisible coconuts for me as we rode up the driveway and back inside his house.
“Hey Karl, for my birthday this year my dad said we can go to Medieval Times. You’ve been there before, right?”
“No. George went with his friends once, though. He said one of the knights almost died.”
“I thought a lot of the knights died? They do fight with swords and axes and halberds.”
“Nah, it’s just pretend. Acting, like Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”
“Oh… well I guess that’s fine too.”
“Yeah, he sat in the Green Knight’s section. George said he’s the bad one.”
“Just like the legend of Sir Gawain…”
And for three months after that, I dreaded sitting in the Green Knight’s section. I read the pamphlet that George had in his room from when he went a couple of years ago. I studied the knights like I’d be tested on them. The Red Knight specialized in the joust, the Blue Knight was skilled with the broadsword, and the Red and Yellow Knight had the coolest armor. The Black and White Knight was the defender of the holy shrine at Santiago de Compostela (I think he was from Cuba) and the Yellow Knight was a master in chivalry. I would’ve taken any of ’em—anyone except for the evil Green Knight.
I pictured him galloping across the field behind Glenwood and crashing through the window on his green steed, grabbing me by the shirt collar as Ms. O’Donnell continued her high-pitched lesson on tipis or African-Americans. I would be defenseless because there was a strict no-weapons rule at school—those socks would get me killed!
But as spring bloomed into summer and my first year at Glenwood came to an end, I had managed to evade all attacks from the Green
